Scope

Natural Product Reports (NPR) is a critical review journal that stimulates progress in all areas of natural products research, including isolation, structural and stereochemical determination, biosynthesis, biological activity and synthesis.

The scope of the journal is very broad, and many reviews discuss the role of natural products in the wider bioinorganic, bioorganic and chemical biology communities. Areas covered include the following:

Enzymology

Nucleic acids

Genetics

Chemical ecology

Carbohydrates

Primary and secondary metabolism

Analytical techniques

NPR articles are designed to give an interesting insight into the topic, focussing on the key developments that have shaped a field rather than giving a very comprehensive overview of all results.

Authors are encouraged to include their own perspective on developments, trends and future directions.

Natural Product Reports Emerging Investigator Lectureship

This Lectureship recognises early career researchers who have made a significant contribution to a natural products-related area of the chemical sciences. From 2019 nominees must be within the first six years of their independent career, either in academia or industry.

This award is presented annually. Nominations open in late summer and close in early autumn.

Nominations are welcome from anyone and are to be sent to the Editorial Office with details explaining the reason for their nomination.

The nominations are then shortlisted and the winner selected by the Natural Product Reports Editorial Board.

The recipient of this award receives: the opportunity to present at a relevant high-profile international meeting with a contribution of up to £500 to cover associated travel and accommodation costs, as well as a framed certificate and an invitation to submit a review article to Natural Product Reports.

Article types

Natural Product Reports publishes:

Reviews

Highlights

Viewpoints

Hot off the press articles

Reviews, Highlights and Viewpoints in NPR are generally solicited by members of the Editorial board; however we are happy to consider submission enquiries from authors. If you are interested in writing an article for NPR please contact the Editorial office with a brief synopsis.

Synopses for all proposed articles are considered by the board before a decision on the commissioning of the full article is taken.

The title, abstract and graphical abstract are the first parts of your manuscript that editors, referees and potential readers will see, and once published they play a major part in a researcher’s decision to read your article. Therefore it’s important that these clearly and concisely summarise the topic of your review and its significance.

Title

The title should be short and straightforward to appeal to a general reader, but detailed enough to properly reflect the contents of your review article.

Keep it relatively short – between 8 and 15 words is ideal.

Use easily recognisable words and phrases that can be read quickly.

Use general or well-known terms for compounds and procedures rather than very specialised terms or nomenclature.

Avoid using non-standard abbreviations and symbols.

Use keywords and familiar, searchable terms – these can increase the chances of your article appearing in search results. Around 70% of our readers come directly via search engines.

Abstract

The abstract is a single paragraph which summarises the contents of your article. It will help readers to decide whether your article is of interest to them.

The length can vary from 50 to 250 words (or up to 100 words for Highlight articles), but it should always be concise and easy to read with recognisable words and phrases.

It should summarise the research area that your review covers, including why it is important.

Like your title, make sure you use familiar, searchable terms and keywords.

Table of contents information

This consists of a small graphic and short text which will appear in the table of contents and feeds (for example, RSS feeds).

The graphic should:

be 8 cm wide x 4 cm high

be a clear representation of what your review is about. Think about what would grab the attention of a reader as they scan though article listings. For example, for synthetic reviews a representative target compound or key reaction scheme work well

include only one or two key elements (as the graphics are small). It’s much better to have a small amount of information that stands out rather than a lot of information which is too small to understand

avoid using graphs or spectra

include text large enough to read and in Arial, Times or Helvetica font

avoid reusing figures from the article

The text should:

be a maximum of 20 words

give a clear indication of the topic discussed in the review and, where possible, why it is important. Again, think about what would grab the attention of the potential reader and would encourage them to read the full article

A twist of nature – the significance of atropisomers in biological systemsFrom DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00121D

Abstracts

This highlight provides an overview of recent progress towards elucidating the structure, biosynthesis, and mode of action of colibactin, a genotoxic secondary metabolite synthesized by human gut bacteria. While isolating colibactin has been problematic, efforts to characterize its biosynthesis have provided critical information that has led to a rapid increase in our knowledge of this metabolite's structure and function. Major questions and gaps remain however, and the broader lessons learned from studying colibactin underscore central challenges to be faced in the genomics era of natural product research and in efforts to understand the human microbiome.From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00091B

Deconvoluting the mode of action of natural products and drugs remains one of the biggest challenges in chemistry and biology today. Chemical proteomics is a growing area of chemical biology that seeks to design small molecule probes to understand protein function. In the context of natural products, chemical proteomics can be used to identify the protein binding partners or targets of small molecules in live cells. Here, we highlight recent examples of chemical probes based on natural products and their application for target identification. The review focuses on probes that can be covalently linked to their target proteins (either via intrinsic chemical reactivity or via the introduction of photocrosslinkers), and can be applied “in situ” – in living systems rather than cell lysates. We also focus here on strategies that employ a click reaction, the copper-catalysed azide–alkyne cycloaddition reaction (CuAAC), to allow minimal functionalisation of natural product scaffolds with an alkyne or azide tag. We also discuss ‘competitive mode’ approaches that screen for natural products that compete with a well-characterised chemical probe for binding to a particular set of protein targets. Fuelled by advances in mass spectrometry instrumentation and bioinformatics, many modern strategies are now embracing quantitative proteomics to help define the true interacting partners of probes, and we highlight the opportunities this rapidly evolving technology provides in chemical proteomics. Finally, some of the limitations and hallenges of chemical proteomics approaches are discussed.From DOI: 10.1039/C6NP00001K

While recent breakthroughs in the discovery of peptide antibiotics and other Peptidic Natural Products (PNPs) raise a challenge for developing new algorithms for their analyses, the computational technologies for high-throughput PNP discovery are still lacking. We discuss the computational bottlenecks in analyzing PNPs and review recent advances in genome mining, peptidogenomics, and spectral networks that are now enabling the discovery of new PNPs via mass spectrometry. We further describe the connections between these advances and the new generation of software tools for PNP dereplication, de novo sequencing, and identification.From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00050E

Table of contents

In this Viewpoint article we examine the roles of bacterially produced small molecules in animal defense, development and evolution.From DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00141A

This highlight reviews recent studies of colibactin, a structurally uncharacterized genotoxin synthesised by members of the human gut microbiota.From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00091B

This highlight focuses on one of Nature's key strategies to doubly modify an amino acid during nonribosomal peptide biosynthesis by using a single enzyme, an interrupted adenylation domain.From DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00120F

Readership information

Academic and industrial scientists working in all areas of natural products research and wider topics including chemical biology, organic synthesis, pharmacology and analytical chemistry.